If I win gold, people will say I'm on drugs

LET'S put it this way. There must be better ways to begin your final countdown to the Olympic Games than to get off a 22-hour flight bleary-eyed and, within four hours, get your hand luggage containing your wallet, passport, personal organisers and mobile phones stolen, and then, while you're trying to sort the whole nightmare out, have to give a sample for the drugs testers. Yep, a wonderful welcome to Oz.

These things happen, of course, but they'd never happened to me before in all these years of jetting around the world.

Before I'd even got to my apartment here in Surfers Paradise, I'd been taken down by van to the nearby centre where I was to be measured for my Great Britain kit.

There was plenty of security around so I thought it would be safe to just put my hand luggage in the back. When I returned 40 minutes later, though, it had gone, presumably the work of some opportunist thief. I just couldn't believe it. Everything was in there, thousands of dollars worth of stuff.

I was worried most by the fact that my two personal organisers were gone, which included lots of private business and friends' details, including phone numbers.

I do most of my transactions by credit cards but they'd gone too and my initial reaction was just how much extra pressure this was going to cause when all I wanted to do was get a quiet, hassle-free settling-in period.

For the next five hours, I was left trying to sort the whole mess out, talking to police, organising insurance, reporting the stolen passport and trying to stop the credit cards even though the time difference meant it was impossible to get hold of anybody back home. News went out on radio but I know there's not a cat in hell's chance of getting any of it back.

Team-mates who heard about it were all very sympathetic and, five days on, I can now honestly say it's gone from my mind.

Basically, at this stage, you can't afford to let any off-track problems blur your focus.

You just have to get on with it and I can say that since that wretched start, everything's being going as sweet as a nut in my preparations here on the Gold Coast.

At the time, though, when I was feeling exhausted and thoroughly miserable, the last thing you need is to suddenly find yourself wanted for a drugs test.

Yet, people seem to have been sensationalising the testers' visit, making a big song and dance about how the fact that they turned up so soon after my arrival was supposedly something particularly unusual.

That's nonsense. It actually wasn't unusual at all. It was just routine, exactly the same as when I arrived at the world championships in Seville last year and was tested within an hour of arrival. I've had about nine or 10 tests this year, including several out of competition, so why should this be seen as anything out of the ordinary?

Athletes don't make a fuss about this kind of thing. It's part of the job.

Yet I believe that all the publicity about doping issues which already seems to be dominating the news on TV and in newspapers, even before the Games, is typical of a media-led campaign to ram the issue down people's throats. They think it is an issue that people are interested in when, actually, I'm sure they probably find the whole thing, as I do, incredibly tiresome.

For us athletes, it is just an irritant.

We're here, ready to perform to our best and to achieve, so how do you think we feel when it appears that all anybody can read about is drugs? It's as though all the publicity is somehow designed to build up insinuations that all athletes must be taking drugs whereas the fact is overlooked that, of thousands and thousands of tests conducted every year, only a tiny percentage of athletes fail one.

And because of all this banging on about drugs, you know what the depressing thing is? If I win a gold medal in Sydney, I don't want people to say, 'How's he done that at 33? What's he on?' But I just know that some people will, because that's the climate of cynicism which is being created by all this stuff.

Although I don't know who takes drugs and nobody else does either, we all have to endure speculation about athletes when such talk is dangerous, unfair and quite pointless.

The International Olympic Committee have been very loud and self- congratulatory about their new testing for EPO. If it leads to some cheats being caught, great, but what about drugs like human growth hormone which they still don't test for? As usual, the whole affair just seems to have been blown out of all proportion.

I'm not denigrating them for this - even though I've long believed that money would be better spent on education programmes aimed at warning against drugs rather than on widening their testing net - but if you want to know what clean athletes think about the drugs situation, well I'll tell you. We don't think about it at all because we have better things to be thinking about, like getting on with performing and achieving.

And like me, clean athletes just hope that this Olympic Games will turn out to be all about performance and achievement, and that it won't become a circus where drugs, not medals, will be what everyone is talking about.

Interview by Chief Sports Correspondent Ian Chadband

* Read Colin Jackson on the Sydney Olympics only in the Evening Standard

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